


The Great Kings of Asgard

by Numina



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Norse Religion & Lore, Edda Easter Eggs, F/M, M/M, Pseudo-Incest, eventual thorki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-21
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 20:33:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13084821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Numina/pseuds/Numina
Summary: Once there was a king of Asgard who had two sons...and a daughter.





	1. The King's Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> I hear this whole thing in Anthony Hopkins' Thor-movie-intro-voice, if that helps it make any more sense to you. It doesn't, to me.
> 
> Fair warning, this is gonna read like the daffiest piece of Mary Sue savior-complex headcanon ever but just...humor me. I won't say it'll make sense but...it's going somewhere, I promise.

Once there was a king of Asgard who had two sons. He’d gotten many children on many women on his path to becoming king, but these two sons he claimed. The first was blessed and beautiful, the only son of his beloved wife, with hair of spun gold and a frame that grew like a spreading oak. He was confident and brave, a born warrior who lived to make his father proud. The younger son was a stranger, born small and abandoned by defeated giants in their retreat, adopted in a moment of sentiment by the victorious king. He was a good son, loyal and loving, contemplative and kind where his brother was brash and thoughtless, for part of him never forgot the feeling of dying in the cold. As he was the get of the great man’s monstrous enemies, who were cunning and brutal and massive and had caused much suffering, that caution in him was seen as hostility, his lingering uncertainty as secretiveness. And so, though raised as an heir of the household, this second child was watched, always watched, for signs of his difference, his cunning, and his hidden strength. Perceptive but unknowing, he learned to watch in kind, and fear himself. 

The king had a step-daughter also, between the two boys in age by an hour. It happened that his first wife, wise and kind, never recovered from the birth of the eldest son, as if forging his perfection had burnt something vital inside her. She had nevertheless fed both babes at her breast, her failing health kept a secret, and not just for her pride. She loved them both, as did the king, and would not foster gossip that her son had harmed her, or that the orphan had come with a curse. And yet there came a sorceress, weary and unwed, to the king’s door, asking whether she might serve his wife and wet-nurse her ravenous sons, begging warmth and protection for her own fatherless infant girl. The king would not question her fortuitous arrival, and so the three children of six bloodlines and two races became family.

His queen lived for several years, for Asgardians live long, with the sorceress as her friend and helpmate, until their three small dear ones came to the first steps of childhood knowing themselves to be kin. And there she left them. When she felt death open to her, she kissed her husband, blessed him, and begged him to marry their daughter’s mother, and to love her without fear of shaming the dead. His grief seemed insurmountable, but in time love proved the stronger, and each woman lay easily in her appointed bed. The family was happy, and the kingdom prospered under its king’s joy. Heimdall the all-seeing guarded their gates, keeping Asgard immune to invaders, and two magical ravens guarded the king's thoughts and memories, keeping him wary of any deception and his kingdom immune to the chaos of misrule.

The children grew, as children do, bonded to one another in love and rivalry, though the eldest son learned statecraft and war from their father, while their mother taught the younger two of subtler powers and finer arts. The daughter thrived in these teachings, having her mother’s facility for the spindles of light and air and her father’s shrewdness for advantage. The younger son struggled, questioning everything and always discontented, uncertain always whether his powers were a sign of the evil others sought in him. He often hid with his sister in the stables, swearing bitterly that he would rather be a farm hand than a sorcerer, and falling often into melancholy. His sister was his closest friend, coaxing him always into trying again, holding him when he felt cold and hopeless, and he in turn stood by her side through every game and scheme, perfecting and crediting her mad notions. They fought often and earnestly, sometimes tumbling with laughter, other times coming to blows, but always closer than birth or blood. From her place by his side, she saw as none other the injustices of their father against him, thinking it the favoritism in birth-order that cast the younger as adversary. Her anger burned with righteous acuity, but the younger brother bade her always patience, subtlety, for he loved her in kind and would not see her punished. Their many mischiefs and secret ways comforted them for a while, watching the world and one another change from their hiding place in the stable loft.

As they reached the age when children venture into majority, the daughter confronted her mother hotly, her tongue too clever by half and earning her a measure of a terrible burden, though only a part of the truth. Her mother confessed the intrigues of her and her brother’s adoption, though not the specifics of their lineage, insisting as ever that they were one family, and their father loved them equally. She confided that the daughter’s lineage was royal, and that she would one day be fit consort to the eldest and most beautiful son. Having no answer to this extraordinary knowledge, the daughter continued to rail against the cyclical injustice heaped on her adopted brother, how suspicion begot guilt which begot further suspicion. How, true, he could be tricky and frivolous and temperamental on his fair surface, but he was also clever and tender-hearted and worthy beneath, every bit as bold and daring and fair as his older brother, if not more, and all this good was buried under the weight of their father’s louring eye. She questioned how her betrothal to the eldest could be right, how his inheritance should be a conclusion so foregone if their father truly loved them all equally.

And spake she true. But her mother was as deeply in love with the girl’s hard-hearted stepfather as the girl was in love with her adopted brother, and defended him as fiercely, making the good of the whole realm from his pleasure and the doom of all from his wrath. This betrothal was the king’s dearest wish, to forge an alliance that would secure the realms and heal old grievances. She swore to tell her daughter the truth of her heritage on her wedding night.

Ultimately the middle child, she relented, keeping the peace, thinking as she returned to her chambers that it might well please her to be queen, to have the power to challenge the legacy of her father’s wars and ego, the idiotic rules of succession. It wasn’t until she was almost calm again that the rest sank in. Marrying her elder brother meant serving as consort instead of living in the world, bearing and mothering instead of study and travel, and her stomach turned. She did not hate him. Indeed, no one could ever have hated him. He was strong and generous and charming, undeniably a true prince and king, as bright and shining as their brother was brooding and stormy. She was even fond of him, from a certain distance. But she had wondered often how she could share blood with any man so very different from herself, so satisfied with calculation and success only, and who seemed to have neither need nor capacity for the sort of trembling tenderness and trust she shared with the younger, which she herself needed like the sun and moon together beneath her cleverness and pride. 

Still, she did all she could to align herself to her father’s plan, telling herself that if she could save her youngest brother by doing so, she could wed the eldest and change her life for his, giving in to service, content, believing she could shed her needs with cleverness and pride. Had she managed it, the worlds might have spun forward in peace, with none of the sorrow that was to follow. Or perhaps not. The whole of her world was built on the flawed and mighty foundation of her father’s blinded eye and unyielding strength, after all. We will never know how that peace would have fared, for her needs had a pride of their own, and would not be broken. So instead she hitched them to a plan.

As her mother made plans to present her at court as a woman and she felt the announcement of her betrothal to be but a matter of weeks away, she confessed to her brother the truth of her own adoption, but not of his, and of her fosterage as future consort to the king. His eyes shone with the thought they shared, and she swore to him in a rush that she would have him to husband, or no husband, no self, no king, no family else. His kisses were as hot as his tears upon her lips, holding her to him with a giant strength that belied their comparable size, the flowering of a long-nurtured passion no longer taboo. 

She begged him to come away with her that instant, to a village of midgard whose witches had learned to hide themselves from the king’s golden-eyed watchman and his magical ravens, where they could be free. Her brother refused, insisting that he could work a fairer scheme. His pride was much like her own, but his love for their family and home was far greater. He swore instead that he would have her with their father’s blessing, and give her everything their upbringing had taught her to desire. She swore over and over that her upbringing had left her wanting nothing but him. She begged him to wait while she spoke to the witches, at least, before revealing his ambitions to their father, and he swore to her that he would, covering her in oaths and chaste kisses all the night, reluctantly letting her go with the dawn.

She went to the golden guardian of the bridge, whose thankless task is to stand between the powerful and their ruin, and said to him “There is a village in the realm of men that I cannot see with my magic. Will you tell me what is there?”

The guardian looked out across the worlds and found that he, too, could not see beyond the village wall at the edge of the Iron Wood. She nodded gravely, as if troubled, and asked to be sent there, to determine the cause and threat of this strange defense, and the golden-eyed guardian reluctantly agreed. So she went to the witches, bringing sorcerous secrets to trade. 

The eldest of the witches, Angrboda, spoke to her fairly, and with her right hand promised to foster their escape, to let them live lives of plenty in midgard. But with her left hand, she offered a different promise: that her beloved younger brother could be king of Asgard, and she beside him, if only she would vow to follow the witch's advising before knowing the price, for it was such a magic that its price could never be fully foreseen. 

The princess knew in her heart that she should be content to live free with the man she loved, but the prize of rule was too tempting to her pride and sense of justice. Confident in her own cleverness, she took the witch’s bargain, pledging the blood-oath on the blade jarnsaxa. Then the witch said to her, “You must return to me before the next full moon begins to wane, bearing in your body the quickened seed of the man you would make king.”

The deal already struck, the princess gaped. Her brother would never lie with her until they were wed. The king would forbid their wedding so long as he were king. And now she could only make her brother king if he lay with her soon...and often. She nodded, thanking the witch (for you must always thank a witch who does not kill you), and returning home, her mind struggling over plans of increasing absurdity.

 


	2. The Daughter's King

Meanwhile the youngest made his own kind of headstrong mischief, stealing away and arriving at his father’s door disguised in illusion as a fearsome giant. He boasted of his might, and offered to build a mighty wall around the kingdom for a trifling price: merely the arbitership of the sun and moon, and the hand of the king’s fairest daughter. The king, despising giants, and knowing how it would please his daughter to rebuff the oaf in her own sharp tongue, said that his daughter was away, but it was a feast night, and the traveler was welcome to wait for her over dinner, to see what she thought of this proposal.

At dinner, the king boasted endlessly. He began with his daughter, her cleverness and grace, her skill with knives, how she could drink as much as any Asgardian warrior and would thus bear many, and how any king’s son would be lucky to have her. He boasted, laughing behind his hand, how she was far fairer than any giant born, though her hair was as black as the king’s ravens. He meant to provoke the giant into breaking hospitality, so the eldest might slay him for entertainment, but the giant only laughed along, drinking the king’s mead and eating his food in great amount. Then the king boasted of his eldest son’s might, how he could kill ten giants in a stroke, and had before, and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again should a giant threaten the family or break its word to them. Again the giant laughed along, unbothered. Last the king boasted of his love for his youngest son, for his clever soft heart and his way with animals and loyal care for his family, how he was pretty enough that if the giant somehow earned his price he might send that son as bride instead.   
  
The youngest son in his cups and illusions felt his heart stir in anger, though he kept his disguise, muttering, “I would not wish to bed your pretty son, for surely you have fucked him too hard his whole life for him to be any use to me. Even where I come from, it is known how your tender attentions have left his prospects as frayed and flaccid as a donkey’s whore.” And though the laws of hospitality defended him from death for this insult, he was thrown in the dungeon, laughing drunkenly for many hours.

The king greeted his daughter’s return at the end of the feast with a wide smile, presenting her with her suitor, now soiled and scuffed but still in his guise as a giant, and let him repeat his proposal. The entire court laughed, and the princess traded a look with the queen, who surely was the only other person in the room who could see through the disguise as easy as breathing. The queen simply shrugged and smiled, making the court roar with laughter again, though the princess knew it to mean that she was washing her hands of their folly.

Fury at her mother and brother both burned her cheeks brightly. He had hatched such an absurd plot in her absence, and their mother had seen and done nothing to stop it. Her evident outrage set the room roaring again. With only thirteen days until the next full moon's wane, he could not possibly build the wall and wed and bed her before she was due back to the witch. She would need him nearly every night, and all the marriage magic she knew, to ensure a quickening as it was. Re-weighing her scheme, she beckoned her father’s ear close. When she had done, he laughed again and nodded his approval.

“Good giant,” she intoned, “I would propose a bet with you. If your ambition of building a king’s wall for the king’s city can reach its fullness before the good moon reaches hers in ten days time, you shall have the prize you seek and with my blessing. Fulfill it not, and you shall go from here with the king’s full peace and forgiveness for your insolence, leaving your incomplete work behind, with no more claim on my hand than what I presently desire to give you,” and she brandished the back of it, setting the high-born tables rolling with laughter yet again, resting that same hand subtly over her heart for his eyes alone.

The giant, secretly her brother, secretly a giant, accepted, saying that he would take this bet if he could have his choice of horseflesh from the stables to help him. She wondered what he was playing at, but assented. The eldest brother called out that a king’s wall must be fifty feet high and ten feet thick, ringing the city’s girth from one gatepost of the bifrost road to the other. The princess raised an eyebrow at her suitor, surprised when he agreed without a flinch. It gave her confidence that he had taken her meaning and intended to fail, to assure that they had the right to leave in peace together. What she had not expected was that he had been working enchantments so that one shape concealed ten horses, nor that his own strength and speed with the construction would be so much greater than she ever had known from him. On the first day, he had completed the entire foundation, his "horse" dragging a plow the size of an oceangoing ship. On the second day, he had completed a fifth of the wall’s height. She marveled at the speed with which love worked him, hardly hearing the distress of her father and brother.

“We must think of something!” her brother cried, brandishing his weapon and clearly already having thought of something.

The king shook with fury, “I cannot make a giant the steward of the sun and moon. The nobles would revolt. We’ll be a laughing stock. And you, my daughter, surely you must have had some stratagem in mind. You always do.”

She nodded, musing dryly to herself that the problem was too many stratagems, not too few. The longer she pondered it, the more convinced she became that their love would never be safe unless he were king.

“Well?” the king thundered.   


She looked over from the window, testily “Well what?”

“This is your wager, daughter, what are you going to do about it?”

She sighed, “Surely you’re not suggesting we interfere in a wager fairly made under our own roof?”

“No,” the king snapped, “I am suggesting that you find some way to interfere with this wager as far from our roof as possible. I will not have a frost giant so near the throne of Asgard! Surely you have no wish to honor his...his…” the great king gestured, flustered as any father trying not to speak of marital things to his flowering daughter, “his plan.”

She looked out of the window again, watching her brother sweating and straining with the strength of ten, “I have no higher ambition than my own king’s pleasure. I will do as you say. Surely he is using some sorcery that will void the bet. I will ride out and discover it.”

She took up the charmed twig that she’d gotten from Angrboda to shield her from the eyes of her father’s watchers, and rode out to treat with her suitor.

 

 


	3. The Making of Monsters

She pulled him from his work in a rage, “You promised me you wouldn’t do anything until I got back!” she handed him a flask of watered wine, admiring his bare shoulders as he drank with pure pleasure and more than a little mischievous smugness. The wind was freezing at the edge of their world, but he was stripped to the waist, his skin steaming.

“No,” he tutted, wiping his mouth with the back of his grimy hand, “I said I wouldn’t reveal my own ambitions, and I haven’t.”

She wanted to stab him, “You’re not nearly as clever as you think. I thought you meant to get us away safe to live as peasants. Do you really mean to trap us here to live as outcasts?”

His face clouded, “What do you mean? As arbiter of the sun and moon…”

She shook her head, “Father will never allow it. Not for long. We would live looking over our shoulders.”

He looked at her, confounded, “Why? As his youngest son surely I…”

“And what when our brother marries another? The fearsome Lady Sif favors him. What of the contest of fates between his children and ours? I am the guarantor of an alliance that likely turns to chaos if I remain in Asgard married to any but father's choice. There is no life for us unless we flee to midgard...or unless I make you king.”

He looked at her and took a step back as if seeing her for the first time, “What can you mean. You know I have my rages, same as you...but how little you must think of me...to think I would hear you in such a notion.”

Her pride burned, longing for his support, fearing to be left alone in her dire dream, “Don’t dare hide behind sentiment and then accuse my heart!”

“Sentiment? To wish at last and for your sake to make father see my worth? We can make them understand, all can be well! Yet you talk of betraying our brother? The throne is his by right!”

“You betray me to say so! I who already see your worth. The succession is just an idiotic rule, the throne a bauble belonging to him that takes it! If you would not be king then ride away with me tonight. I have cover,” she held the sprig over his head, kissing him fiercely, “and now so do you. Father’s spies cannot follow us. ”

He embraced her, and for a moment she was certain all was well and they would go, live their lives together having adventures and discovering new shores, putting Asgard behind them. But when she pulled back, she saw his eyes were shining, and that she was breaking his heart into a thousand pieces asking him to abandon his home. The wind chilled the sweat on his shoulders and he shivered, pleading “I...I promise, it won’t be as you say.”

She squinted at him, “You promise? Have you learned nothing from mother? The world is cruel. We get what we take, or we take what we get.”

He set his face in that righteous princely way that their father had not managed to shame out of him, and turned his back on her, “Just like father, if you will not hear me, then I will just have to show you,” and he set to work again, heaving stones twice his size onto the wall as if he really were a giant, the ten-horse horse dragging him mountains of fresh rocks from the quarry.

She huffed a laugh, “You...you truly mean to secure me to this blind scheme of yours against my will?”

He shrugged, his voice as heavy as his task, “You made the bet, and I will not commit treason, and I will not live without you.”

“I’ll go tell father now, expose your lie, your cheat with the horses, then you’ll see his mercies will never extend to your defiance.”

He only paused a moment, heaving another rock, “You won’t do that. You really believe he would kill me. You’re wrong but...you love me too much to risk it, certain as you are in your endless cynicism.”

The bitterness of it knocked the wind out of her as surely as the wind at the edge of their world yanked at her cloak, “And you...you do not love me enough...to risk leaving...” and she felt tears rarer than diamonds sting her eyes and tickle her cheeks.

He ran to her, amazed, falling to his knees at her feet, “I love nothing in this whole world but you!”

She laughed, helplessly, “Our father and our brother torment you endlessly and yet you love them. I would give you everything, Thor. Everything that I am. Myself, my home, I would watch the world burn for you and you…” she shook her head, “you see me no more than father sees you.”

He pulled her down into his arms, “Loki, that isn’t true. How can you say that?”

She pushed him away, “How can you do this? When Baldur is king...”

“He will still be our brother!”

“And he will be my husband! Father will see to it, and mother will support him! Don’t you see? They’ll kill you, Thor. If you stand between father and his ambitions for Asgard’s greatness, he’ll find a reason to lock you away forever, because just like you, he loves this stupid shining pebble of a city and that idiotic horned throne more than any living thing, even himself. Open your eyes and see it for once in your stupid life! No matter how much he claims to love us he would murder us in our sleep for the sake of the succession of Asgard.”

He cupped her cheek in his blistered hand, hope crumbling behind his eyes, “I can’t be what you want me to be, Loki, even if it would save our family from your anger. I’m no king.”

“Liar,” she spat, “You have a patience and a kindness in you that Baldur, for all his beauty, will never have. Look at what you’re able to do, what strength you have, after only a few hours shielded from our father’s grim expectations, how you’ve surprised him, and me too, even though he believed you were a giant and I’ve known all my life that you’re a king.”

He shook his head, resting his forehead against hers, “You are the only one who believes that.”

“Which is what makes me smarter than you,” she kissed him with the guileless hunger at the end of worlds, “come away with me, just for the night, you’re so far ahead...you shall win the bet with time to spare...but I don’t care about tomorrow. I want you now, just once, before the end.” 

“If I go they’ll wonder where the giant has gone. They might send for me to find out, and all Hel would break loose.”

Loki gestured, undoing Thor’s illusion on the ten horses, making them instead look like a great giant hurling stones up on the wall. She pulled at him, “Now you’d best come away or they’ll wonder why the giant thinks he can enlist another giant without breaking the bet.”

“And they’ll think you’ve run off with the horse.”

She shook her head, mounting her mare and giving him a hand up behind her, “I don’t give a first fuck what they think. Come away with me out of this cold.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and nuzzled into her neck as she rode off toward the deep cave the wall’s supplying had made in the quarry, far below where light or sight could reach them. She pulled him down in the dark, pushing him onto her cloak and straddling his hips with a hunger, the thought of Angrboda's bargain a far second concern to her need. She lay on him as they’d rested many times, young and horny, heated by the sight of the horses mating, exploring only as far as the safe edge of their world, never crossing into the domain of spouses and livestock.

He shook his head as she caressed him, “I will not lay with you until you are my wife.”

“Then don’t lay with me, hump me up against the wall.”

His voice trembled, “I would be afraid…”

“Of hurting me?” he was so precious, “I want it to hurt. It already hurts. I want my body to hurt from your loving me as much as my heart hurts knowing that you don’t.”

He sat up, finding her face in the utter dark with his hand before kissing her, “Don’t say things like that. You’ve seen what my strength is when I want you. I don’t know how to control it.”

She leaned against him, pressing him down, “Then lie still and I will make the beast with two backs from the both of us.”

He sat up under her again, his voice becoming husky and hot, “You are so vulgar,” digging down the front of her dress to unearth a ripe breast and setting upon it like a starving beast. So they writhed in the dark beneath the earth, invisible shadow-puppets making monsters from two lithe forms. She loosed the lap of his clothing and took him under her skirts, writhing together with him like a great serpent. He ripped her bare and mouthed her pale skin unseen, chuffing and slavering like a wolf devouring the darkened moon. She bent for him like a horse-breeder’s assignation, and they made the eight-legged horse while she pledged in her prideful heart to make their father ride it’s get the rest of his days.

Over and over he spent his seed in her the way kings spend the blood of their lessers: heedlessly, willfully, hungrily, growling and raving and staring into the blind darkness with eyes that claimed to see glory. Every time they rested, one would begin it again. At the very last, she rested her neck back over his forearm on the earth, and he mounted over her, laying with her like a husband, breaking his vow to forebear until they were wed and forging it anew, “I am yours, and you are mine,” he sheathed himself deeply, claiming her willingness, pledging her his heart and body and life, and she answered him in kind, pledging marriage in the old way, like the beginning of the world.

When she finally lead him out, he had eyes only for her, the light of the full moon bathing her face in triumphant radiance. Then, as slowly as the moon, the realization dawned on him, and while he stared at the sky in despair she was back upon her mare and gone, riding hard to the village of Angrboda in the Iron Woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I picture Carrie-Anne Moss as fem Loki. YMMV


	4. Mysteries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: birth imagery, animals killed, gender stuff

As she approached the witch her young breasts felt heavy and her belly swelled painfully full, gravid with intent. The witch lay her down in a circle, chanting, invoking the name of the allfather to send his blessing to this new mother.

Loki sat up, sweating with pain, “What? What are you doing?”

“Trust me child,” the witch unfurled her long gray hair, braiding it into a net with mistletoe and yew twigs at the corners. Loki could imagine her father screaming, sending his ravens, fast as thought, to seek out where the vision of his daughter was coming from after she and Thor had been missing for ten days.

Loki labored hard, screaming like she would die, but the witch slapped her across the face, “Focus, little godling! You must focus on the way you wish your beloved to be known in the allfather's eye.”

She closed her eyes, her mind skating away on wave after wave of birthing pain, but fixing images of Thor as she saw him in her mind, Odin’s true heir, bright and charming and merry, stormy and temperamental, loved. A prince of Asgard every bit as worthy as Baldur, so plainly worthy that even the fussy foolish aristocracy of her father’s house would see it. Worthy of him. Worthy of her. Pure-born son of his father and first in his love.

She heard a rustle of wings and a querulous caw as Munin, the raven of Memory, few into the room. Angrboda swept the net of her hair into the air, snatching the massive bird down and pinning it by its neck as she raised her knife.

“No!” Loki yelled, before crying out again over another contraction, hardly feeling the witch’s hand smearing the bird’s blood over her sweating face, moonlike belly, and gorey thighs as the bird gurgled and fluttered piteously, dying.

“Don’t cry, girl,” the witch croaked, “we’re making him a new one. Now concentrate.”

Loki felt something move, mercifully agonizing, a fullness sliding from her belly to her canal. There was another flutter of wings and another fling of the net, and Hugin, the raven of thought, was beside her. Loki winced in fear, but the witch merely pressed its beak shut between her two fingers, aiming one of its eyes at its dead brother, murmuring, “Bird, you will obey me, I bind you to obey me, or your master will break, and the Odinsleep will consume him. I bind you with yew and with mistletoe against thoughts of this day, or anything hence disagreeing with your new brother. He is your only brother now, your master’s only version of memory, and the royal memory within the bounds of Asgard, and you will not betray it with dwelling on inconsistent hints.”

She released the bird and it stood tamely on her leg, croaking once and preening calmly where the witch’s grip had ruffled him. Loki screamed her last contraction and heard another loud caw, as her body birthed a new Munin from deep need and dark magic, both birds bursting through the window and away. She sat up groggily, sore and drained but also lighter, triumphant. Her voice was rough from screaming and felt strange in her ears, “What happens now?”

The witch stared at her in a terrible silence, her jaw open.

Loki glared at her, “Tell me what happens now! Is it done? Will it hold?”

The witch shook her head, holding out the iron knife to Loki’s hand, “For the spell to hold you must take this knife. You must take your mistletoe to Baldur, so no one may watch you, blinding the eyes of Heimdall, for he is the only one who does not sleep in the fog of your spell tonight. When this last deed is done, the spell will hold,” she dropped her voice cryptically, “it is far from the first time the allfather has changed his mind.”

Loki reached out and took the knife. The hand that reached was still her hand but her wrist looked sinuous and strange. She dismissed it, thinking of how pregnancy could make a woman’s feet change as well.

She nodded, saying again in her oddly roughened voice, “What must I do.”

“There were things you did not know when you began, things that needed to change too far for memory alone to erase them. Baldur cannot remain in Asgard. Thor will need his place. Odin...will only remember having two sons.”

“But he only has…” and Loki looked down at himself for the first time, trembling at his naked body, smeared in his father’s dead memories, stunned into silence.

“It is no easy thing to turn a storm giant into a son of Asgard, to turn an all-father’s fear into love. You did very well, but the wish was for more than you could have known, or I could have predicted, and a secret the size of the one that was kept from Thor cannot simply be wiped away from his father's heart. It must be borne. You will need to cut Baldur’s mantle from him and give it to Thor, or the new story you’ve birthed will crumble. Odin will remember one son who is his bright king and firstborn, and the adopted son who does not know he is a Jotun by birth. But Thor will be king, and you by his side, as I promised.”

Loki swallowed, “But what...am I? Am I still Frigga’s daughter or am I an orphaned Jotun?”

Angrboda nodded, “You are what you were. Your role is but a word, your blood unchanged, but as Thor takes Baldur’s role, you must take his.”

Loki shook their head, “But...what of the middle sister? Where will she be?”

Angrboda shook her head, sighing, “Oh child, oh sweet daughter of women…”

“Tell me, midwife.”

She looked at Loki sadly, “Clever girl...oddling...you know how easily we disappear...”

Loki’s hand on the iron knife trembled and she pitched over forward, laughing at a joke too large for words.


	5. Change of Fate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: More gender stuff.

Loki thanked the midwife and left. Her horse had fled so she had to walk back to Asgard. It wasn’t far. With the whole city in the haze of an Odinsleep, the realm of gods hovered close to midgard, and getting there that night was as easy as walking to the horizon and stepping off, for a sorceress.

She walked, trying to take the measure of her body. It was hers. His. She was theirs. It was very confusing but also...fine. Just a thing in the world. She did not feel like a man, a son, a prince...but then when she reached for her sense of herself as a girl, a daughter, a wife, a mother...she found she had never felt those things either. She’d believed in them, like a family religion, but they’d apparently had even less power than she’d thought. The nearest she could say was that she felt...turned. Like the dark of the moon or a page in a book, both sides still existing, both sides only one thing, though only one could be read by others. Her hands were still her hands. His eyes had always been his eyes. There was no body part, lost or found, where gender lay, no more than there was a quantum of blood that made family. Middle-born or last. Asgardian or Jotun. This or that. Loki was Loki. He tried on “he” like a suit of clothes on his naked and bloody skin. It tickled, but not unpleasantly. He swung his lack of hips as he walked, his higher center of gravity. There was something pleasant in walking without binders on his chest and nothing pendulous pulling at his posture, though the new pendulousness between his legs would need...strategizing...uncomfortable and foreign but...not bad. Things adopted were family soon enough, much like the flaps and fuzz and swellings of change the first time around. Get what you take or take what you get. It seemed like a good secret.

He walked past Heimdall, wearing nothing but the magic sprig of mistletoe behind his ear. The guardian’s head was bowed but his golden eyes were unclosed, and Loki thought, for an odd fleeting moment, that the baleful eyes turned fractionally his way as he passed. But he passed.

He found Baldur asleep at table, his friends and hangers-on arrayed around him, the beauteous and dangerous Lady Sif about his neck like a steel shawl. Loki moved the other woman’s arms away, feeling sorely apologetic as she did. Still, there was no world where Odin would have let them be together. One way or another, willing or not, Loki would have come between them. She took Baldur by the hair and pulled back until the great, shiningly handsome would-be king lay back in her arms, helpless and dreaming. Loki kissed him on the forehead, adjusting his hand’s grip on the iron knife jarnsaxa.

“I’m sorry, brother,” he murmured earnestly, feeling the role of the bad son, the treacherous one, the stranger, the one that needed watching, settle in onto his brow, “I never hated you.”

He tucked the sprig of mistletoe behind Baldur’s ear, and plunged the knife into his chest, feeling the blade drink the golden nectar of his greatness, the mead of his story, the mantle of his birth, leaving behind only a mortal man. The knife mercifully closed its wound behind itself, and Baldur, thus removed from the magic of Asgard and it’s affliction of odinsleep, opened his eyes.

“Where...am I?”

Loki smiled, helping him to stand, lying easily, “You’re dreaming. You’re a skald. You wandered here because tonight the veil is thin, and now you’re going home, before the worlds part again. Just walk out past the guard, and you’ll find yourself on the road to your village. You do tend to sleepwalk, and to forget yourself, but the stories will come back to you all the same. Your mother’s name is Angrboda, she’ll be looking for you I imagine.”

Baldur nodded, “Yes...of course. Thank you. This was a lovely dream.”

Loki nodded, “For some. Farewell.”

When he didn’t find Thor in the dungeon, he went up the stairs to where Odin sat in his far-seeing chair, his head to one side, Hugin and Munin asleep on the ground beside a half-stripped and penitent Thor. For the first time, Loki felt a stab of yearning for what he’d lost, a burst of grief and uncertainty. But he’d come too far, and done it all for someone other than himself, he insisted. He picked Thor off the floor, bracing himself under one large arm, marvelling at the new wiry strength of his own shoulders. That was convenient. As he pulled him, Thor began to stumble along groggily, helping. Finally he got him back to Baldur’s seat, cradling him in his arms in kind, murmuring, “This had better work…”

He pressed the blade into Thor’s heart, releasing a rush of Asgardian gold into his blood, and marveled at how nothing changed but the pain around his eyes. Thor the fearless. Thor the thunderous. Thor the worthy.

Loki leaned him forward onto the table in their lost brother’s customary place, wrapping his large hand round his mug for good measure, draping Lady Sif against him in kind...an aesthetic choice, he assured himself. Then he ran back to his room, feeling woefully short on illusions to spend hiding that fact that he was bare-ass naked, caked in dry birthwater and blood. And he wept, and he laughed, and he slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki of the Eddas is a very precious thing to many of my genderfluid, bigender, and agender friends, and I wanted to honor that. I in no way intend to imply that gender is not real for people who experience it as real and fixed, either cis or trans. When a person tells you what their experience of their own gender is, you should just believe them. When someone tells you what your experience of gender is supposed to be, you should just tell them to go eat a bag of live slugs. My Loki is very fluid. That doesn't mean everyone is.


	6. How it Begins

The next day was much like any other, as far as anyone could tell. Loki walked about strangely, marveling at nothing anyone else could see, feeling his body in his clothes like the air in his lungs. He told himself that he had won, that things were better than they’d been. He pressed down the needling feeling that he might have lost his brother’s love, even still feeling his kisses on his lips, trying to assure himself that time would tell.

There was indeed a half-made wall around the city, and crews were working to finish it. It would be truly impressive. He clearly remembered how the giant had come, demanding Frigga's hand as the price for building it. He remembered it, alongside the way it had really happened. Loki remembered proposing the bet, and being ordered to find some way to cheat it, and when prince Loki had transformed himself into a mare and lured the horse away, the giant failed, and Thor had killed him. That had been weeks ago. He knew because he'd just gotten back and there had to have been time for the...but that couldn't be right...

He wandered over to the stables and indeed there was a new foal there, wobbling on eight spindly legs, being nursed by a fostering mare. Loki sighed, running a hand over the dark foal's flank when it came by the door to nose him for treats. Odd little fatherless orphan. Like father like son. He wanted to laugh at the absurd little thing, to explain to him that he was just a saying, a euphemism, a misunderstanding, a way for people to call the jealous and vindictive prince Loki a horse-fucker behind their hands but...he was also a small, helpless thing in the world, an amazing little misfit. For once Loki couldn't laugh, smiling tenderly and resolving that Sleipnir would never be without apples.

He climbed up to the loft, knowing full well what he wouldn't find. The windowsill wasn't scarred by dagger-marks. No stash of old quilts and books. No handprint with a smaller handprint inside it. It had never been a hideout for young bandits. There would be marks in the practice-yard, though. Places where Loki had doodled in the wood with his dagger while Thor had trained, the dent in the bench where they'd played too hard and Thor had knocked himself out cold. There had been other secrets, other moments, other kisses and discoveries, but the same story...for a bright brief time they'd played at the idea of being together, but ultimately it seemed like Thor was choosing to fulfill his role and appease their father, the idiotic rules about what a king must be, what he must do, how he must love. Loki couldn't quite laugh at him, either. The amazing Thor, who in another life had also been an amazing misfit.  And who was his, whether he knew it or not.

He strolled out to Heimdall’s post to look out over the worlds, smiling like the father of wolves, “I bet you’re wondering what’s different.”

Heimdall said nothing.

Loki grinned, “You’re the only one so far to notice. I changed my hair!”

Heimdall sighed, “You are as I have always seen you, Loki Friggasdottir.”

Loki swallowed but Heimdall shook his head, “My knowledge of these things threatens my king, and so I shall forget, as should you. You will never be content in what you have wrought.”

Loki shrugged airily, “I'm never going to be content anyway. I don’t think it’s in my nature. But I think I will be well with it. Eventually. Thor...he’ll be happy now and that...that’s enough. I did it for him. For father. For all of us, I think.”

“You did it to hold on to him, and will yet do more,” the golden galaxies of his eyes swirled, “You will hurt and kill and fight and die to hold him. You will tell a thousand thousand lies, like your father before you, to preserve the Asgard you have made. You will torment yourself at arm’s reach, and you will hurt him like none other could, and his love for you will burn you both like ice. Your sanity will ache under the strain of your kaleidoscoping needs, pushing him away and drawing him back, just as his will suffer for not knowing why he so passionately hates and fears the giants, why he searches for a woman with dark hair and a powerful mind. His sister was the price. If ever you bring her back to life, your Asgard will be lost, and he will know what you have done. You will bear with this a very long time, sometimes the victor but never for long. You will feel at times like you are going mad from your knowledge and your need, bearing both alone, but it’s the things you do not yet know about yourself and what you have done that will finally drive you insane. When you learn how much you’ve lost and stolen and suffered for a plan so doomed, your rage will tear you apart.”

Loki swallowed, trying to sound indifferent, “What will I do then?”

Heimdall sighed, “You will try, with all your heart, to set him free. Free of this place, and free of you. As I am advising you to do now. Be a prince of Asgard. Take pleasure in your own life. Let your brother live his. Take lovers. Fight with enemies. Have children. Learn to be content.”

Loki sighed, nodding, “I feel like life is a set of lies, the ones here today no different from yesterday...and I swapped them blindly, trying to brute-force the puzzle but...I love him and I...but you're right," Loki stood up straight, looking out over the cosmos with the firm resolve that is the luxury of the young and terribly clever, “I will, Heimdall. Thank you for...you’re right. About letting him go, before I make it worse. As I love him, I will try.”

Heimdall nodded sadly as the young prince strode back across the bridge to his home, “I know you will, Loki Laufeyson. You will try and you will fail. And that is how it begins.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Tom Hiddleston doesn't want me making up weird-ass backstory to explain the acres of subtext in his performance, he should be worse at his job.


End file.
